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Wolf Tivy Profile picture
@wolftivy
Feb 24 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
We live under two parallel governments. There's the classical government of the constitution, and then there's this whole other thing with its own laws, taxes, and citizenship in the universities, bureaucracies, media: the Cathedral. These two regimes are now at war.
For a long time the Cathedral was engaged in a semiconscious slow-rolled revolution against the republic: undermining citizenship with mass immigration, undermining free discourse with censorship, undermining the authority of public officials via bureaucracy etc.
Meanwhile the Cathedral was building up its own parallel state: opaque expert consensus replaces elected authority, university credentials replace citizenship, tuition and various financial gatekeeping replace taxes.
Over the past 15 years what we've seen is the acceleration of this revolution under obama, backlash from the public starting 2014 and 2016. A totalitarian almost-hegemony of the cathedral 2018-2023, and recently a more serious counter-revolution from the republic under Trump.
In this more fundamental conflict, the Trump admin is still outgunned, and has not taken more than baby steps to go after their real adversary, the Cathedral. Nor has anyone made a strong case that the restored republic would be capable of rule, nor what it would have to become.
The Cathedral got as far as it did because the republic is severely out of date, and the Cathedral picked up important functions and dynamism that the republic left on the floor. If you dissolved the Cathedral entirely tomorrow, its unclear if the republic is still functional.
This is what we were trying to figure out with @palladiummag: what comes after the Cathedral? It is an unacceptable totalitarian vampire state, but there is no obvious alternative. It either must be transformed into something better, or defeated and the republic transformed.
@palladiummag This fundamental situation has not changed, despite apparent signs that Trump and Elon are finally championing the republic against the Cathedral. The republic is still obsolete. We still need a new post-liberal synthesis. MAGA isn't there yet.

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More from @wolftivy

Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Dec 7, 2024
The scaling thesis stated this way is obviously untrue. A humble spider has millions or billions of times less compute than a GPT, but more agency. There is very obviously an algorithmic gap between here and AGI.
The scaling laws observation is very interesting and is probably somewhat true, but it's better stated like this: the bottleneck for any network capable of representing some function is compute and data, not algorithm. Note the qualifier: capable of representing the function.
This is not that surprising. The difference between universal learners (that can represent the "true" hypothesis and can learn reasonably efficiently) is basically how good their prior is, and any half-decent prior is probably within a constant factor of any other.
Read 5 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 6, 2024
We're officially in the post-Moldbuggian era now. The Cathedral regime is collapsing and about to be routed over next 4 years. Political economy fundamentals remain, but the specifics of the progressive consensus look pretty busted over the course of this year.
Maybe I'm just hyped on election comedown, but I've been seeing this all year. Elon going all in, the rest of silicon valley breaking right, no big election violence, no wall-to-wall elite "resistance", no funding for journalistic persecution of random commenters, etc.
The thing to watch will be how this MAGA stuff in power interacts with the deep state and core Cathedral (universities, etc). Will they get frozen out and prevented from doing anything fundamental, or will they be able to make a deal?
Read 4 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Aug 27, 2024
The fundamental problem with totalitarianism, of communist, fascist, or liberal variety, is that when it dies, it takes the whole civilization down with it. It bends all its effort to killing and looting anything that might survive its end.
Of course the viability of the "liberal totalitarianism" construction should tell you that injunctions against totalitarianism don't work. The only thing that works is very creative insurrectionary resistance.
But the political valence of insurrectionary anarchism should likewise give you pause: that too will be recuperated by the death-regime as soon as there is any legitimacy or social viability there.
Read 4 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Apr 29, 2024
I'm a "have kids" guy but 8 billion is too many right now. Most are just a waste of space. The actual problem is differential fertility. *They* are having too many kids. *You* are not having enough.
But in degenerate societies, there's too much abstract fake value available that competes with basic biological realities. Most high quality people today would have to be almost coerced to reproduce.
I keep warning you guys not to value the slavecoin and TV morality or you will literally be exterminated like a disposable slave class, but most people have lost their will to live.
Read 6 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 24, 2022
Hominid brain volume on a log scale. Huge inflection point 2 Mya. Who wants to be that's the advent of complex society?
The cause can only be a social arms race wherein an ape-person of superior intelligence was able to get access to vastly more/better sex and resources by climbing a complex social hierarchy. This implies socially enforced boundaries, and significant intrigue: Society.
Magafauna hunting and fire almost certainly helped enable this by making energy much cheaper, but why was intelligence so favored? There are other big predators, even pack hunters. Complex social structure seems the key.
Read 7 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 24, 2022
This same argument applies to an AI future: it's too easy to force conformity when everything is engineered.

Whether this is true or if there's some way that conformity never actually works is the most important theological problem of all time; it determines the whole future.
This is the "singleton question": is it possible for a global power to permanently wipe out variation in ambitions and thus lock itself into an arbitrary value system, or is such a tower of babel doomed to become confounded and fragment?
The reason this is a theological question is that it's about the possibility of rebellion against God. A successful singleton would constitute a permanent usurpation of natural law (Logos) as the source of order in the universe. It's thus about the nature of the apocalypse.
Read 4 tweets

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